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Forum fuels social rights debate

EUROPEAN bodies representing all sides of the social policy debate are looking to this month’s European Social Policy Forum to provide new impetus for their demands for wider social rights to be written into the EU treaty.

But hopes that the forum’s conclusions could be fed into the IGC debate on social policy have been undermined by the fact that the gathering takes place on 28-30 March, coinciding exactly with the formal launch of the IGC.

The forum, which results from a commitment from the Commission’s 1994 White Paper on European social policy, will also mark the publication of a report by the ‘Comité des Sages’, under former Portuguese Prime Minister Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo. The report will detail ways of updating the 1989 social charter and consider whether it should be limited to social rights, or widened to cover economic and cultural or even civil and political rights.

The meeting will draw together as many as 1,000 representatives from the social partners, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), EU institutions, national and local administrations, and will be addressed by Social Affairs Commissioner Pádraig Flynn and Commission President Jacques Santer.

Commission officials are conscious of complaints since Maastricht that groups not formally involved in the social dialogue have been denied a proper outlet for their views.

Many delegates hope to divert the debate away from the current preoccupation with procedures and decision-making, and focus on the need to redefine the EU’s approach to social policy. “Because the UK has not signed up to the Social Protocol, there has been a reluctance to achieve much more than to get the UK to join in,” said one lobbyist.

The Commission is calling for the inclusion in the treaty of specific articles forbidding all discrimination and proposing the integration of the Social Protocol in the treaty, as well as a more precise definition of the Union’s aims with regard to the battle against social exclusion, poverty and unemployment. Flynn has long expressed his support for the idea of writing a more detailed commitment to citizens’ economic and social rights into the treaty.